Last post for now with overarching thoughts. I'm glad I've been able to help catch loose ends and I hope that some in-depth player feedback is helpful even if much of the game is already built.
The Party
Ramona:
Spending money on abilities is a fun way to play with resources, especially early-game when funds are tighter, proportional costs are weird narratively but seem necessary to keep them from getting spammable later. Her stats ended up on the tankier side for me which was great because she basically spent the whole game off-balance.
I thought her bluntness and impatience for bullshit played well off all the surrounding bullshit. I liked the arc of her clawing her way back on top of her own life situation, even if I accidentally overshot the plot on that.
Bribe - used it a few times, sometimes to see if it works. Didn't really need it most of the time, even if it was always the most "affordable". Wish it worked on the chaser minibosses.
Spray - early-game mainstay, kind of determined how well the fight was gonna go on its own. I think the few times I used bribe as intended were when a spray failed me. Still useful later on if there are more beefy enemies, it's usually good to debuff or stun a few.
Business Talk - gimmicky save when I was overlevelled to fight the first sewer wrath slime by alternating between this and lunge. Rarely used but always key when I did use it. Locking down any enemy for 2 rounds is great when fighting only one enemy.
Self-Care A - used it on Kyrie for fights where I wanted to her to fuck something up in a hurry. Shame it doesn't have any priority but I guess that's on me for not paying enough attention to the AGI stat
Self-Care B - never used it at all.
All Business - seldom used it, by the time I got it, Ramona's basic attack was dealing enough damage to be worth it to preserve her attack stat in most circumstances
Loud Speech - I think I used it with Erase Presence, once. Which was a cool synergy. I just didn't often need to draw aggro
Shank - Used it pretty often. When Lunge got accidentally downgraded I switched over to it as my Lunge replacement
Rummage - Used it sometimes, if I was using All Business or couldn't deal much damage with Ramona in a fight for whatever reason
Lunge - mainstay the entire time I had it. Big damage and a defense debuff that everyone could leverage. The defense debuff on Ramona barely registered most of the time.
See you in hell - eats HP for breakfast. If you have the healing items to use it, and you're in a boss fight, you use it. I know it's going to get nerfed but I think I'd have had it equipped to someone even if it was doing half the damage.
Devon:
Basically never used his physical attacks at all. Gave him all the magic pills - it seemed like a waste of half the effect to use them on Kyrie or Ramona's MDF alone. I didn't really pay attention to whether enemies were doing physical or magic damage until I noticed them nulling off of him.
I liked "silence" as an esoteric magic element and his phone-artifact dialogue quirks. I felt like it was odd that he doesn't really interact with anyone in his own life besides the other two party members. Kyrie and Ramona's isolation make sense but he's got an online social life, and I think he alluded to roommates. It'd be nice to see him as he relates to people he's known longer.
Also, I wasn't sure that his bat attacks were "magic" attacks at first, or if the magic was just in that they had guaranteed aim, mostly because my brain is stuck the physicality of hitting someone with a baseball bat. I'm still not sure of the relative damage of each attack skill or if they all do the same base damage.
Concentrate - basically any turn he didn't have something more important to do.
Shut you up - reliable, nice to have late-game when another magic attack might wake or unstun someone I don't want to
True silence - used on occasion. If I didn't plan well I got fucked over for several turns in a row. One time kyrie got confused in Blood rush before I dropped this and I just watched her run into walls for 4 turns
Erase presence - used rarely, see synergy with Loud Speech
Silence is bliss - late game magic attack of choice, no contest
Swing for the fences - sometimes useful when up against a bunch of little guys but usually too costly once Kyrie had Hunt Down
Pretend it's not there - only just got this, too much money and resources to bother spending MP on healing at this point, plus hidden is a drawback if I'm using it on anyone but devon
Redirected noise - pretty good when there are two big enemies on the field, takes one mostly out of the question for a few turns
Forced sleep - I used it in about the same circumstances as redirected noise, it was good to have a backup option or turn off someone's attacks all the way sometimes
Kyrie:
Star of the show (in combat) for most of the game since arriving on the team. Never a wasted turn. Her evasion was pretty good for most of the game so I never felt like she was much of a glass cannon, especially with her mask up stance and HP boosting items.
Her class title was a wild surprise. Coupled with the lore about how adventurers just sometimes up and get addicted to killing, I think it was a well-timed escalation of the degree to which this setting is openly fucked. I did feel like there were a few too many cutscenes and dialogue beats after that in which the party encountered someone she'd want to target and held her back. There's too many assholes in the city for that to not get a little stale. I am curious to see how they'll explain this to Jasper.
Death threats - pretty frequent flier. often use them the turn before switching from Mask up to Blood rush.
Focused blow - used sometimes, especially if blinded or dealing with an evasion-boosted enemy, but usually the other two party members had "guaranteed hit" locked down
Mask up - used in more fights than not. Longer fights, I'd switch to this for her to lay some opening buffs and debuffs or throw items at people. Shorter ones, if I thought I could grab a few extra hundred HP
Blood rush - also used more often than not. Really my preferred method to make big hp numbers smaller of all the means available to the party. It seemed to me that the attack debuff affected the strength of non-basic attacks, so there was still a reason not to be in any stance sometimes.
Hunt down - better than swing for the fences most of the time - cheaper to spam, higher damage (in most circumstances). Missing one or two of a pack of enemies didn't really matter too much to me.
Vengeance - surprisingly not used very often, I think because if I was trying to kill one target then I'd just activate Blood rush so that I didn't need to keep Kyrie near dead. Maybe used it once or twice to get more damage out of a defensive Mask up turn.
Friendly advice - unlocked this early, also a great buff to throw on at the beginning of longer combats while Masked up
Crocodile Tears - barely used, takes a lot of HP for an unreliable counterattack for one turn from a character with low defenses. Not a good tradeoff against reliable damage on my own turn (like Hunt down) for cheaper.
Game balance
At the beginning of the game I was having an authentic level 1 fuck-you experience. I couldn't walk to the first interesting things in the forest without risking my entire life and losing progress from my save. Spray was an unreliable option, Bribe was a costly one when my finances were measured in bags of chips between Ramona and death. Recruiting Devon was probably the first thing I should have done. The wall that I was running into could have probably inspired me to buy a hint, but I forgot that system was there by the time I realized the wall was there. Honestly, they could stand to advertise more.
Between recruiting Devon and Kyrie, I was still struggling, especially with world-map chase bosses, increasingly because I was hoarding stat pills. Recruiting Kyrie evened the odds a lot. When I started using up my stat pills it tipped over into being on the easier side. Most of my game-overs were pre-Devon, a handful happened pre-Kyrie, but I don't think I hit game over more than one or two times after that.
I think my playthrough might be an anomaly due to both my cluelessness with stat pills and tendency to wander and grind aimlessly. I didn't run very often because it wasn't very reliable (even after clearing two strata in the tower, I can't escape, like, wasps), and fighting my way through usually cost less than the bribe. The encounter rate and random spawns in dungeons are erratic - sometimes encounters appeared within 3 steps of each other - which is completely thematically necessary, probably, but meant I waded through piles of enemies that didn't really pose much of a threat whenever I went somewhere intended for earlier in the game. Since the drop rates on pills remain fairly consistent across most enemies, you can effectively grind for bigger stats most anywhere. My finances turned around when I started selling enemy item drops in bulk and 100%ing the quests I took instead of getting partial credit. I think I ended the game with about 67 souls sold and hadn't even noticed when multiple collectibles started hitting their cap at 99. I still really enjoyed the game and only rarely turned my brain off for fights even when those fights were one-sided.
Level scaling felt a little out of place. Your stats get bigger with higher levels, but when enemies' stats rise in tandem, it feels pretty meaningless. I don't mind the concept that you'll never get strong enough to one-shot a raccoon, but having the raccoon's level go up alongside mine muddled what levels were supposed to represent. I feel like it's too baked into the game math to really recommend any alternative at this point, though. Once I knew it was happening I stopped caring about levelling up except as a means to acquire more skills, and started keeping an eye out for level-free stat boosts. Because of this, I took 1 level-down stat-up potion by accident and the other 4 or 5 when I figured I was at the end of everyone's skill chain - didn't seem to have any drawbacks at that point
In combat, I paid a lot of attention to status effects and abilities and very little to stats. I very occasionally checked a foe's MDF and DEF to see if Devon or Kyrie should deal with them but most of the time I attacked with the ethos that damage was damage. The exception was the Company Man miniboss with the defense-swapping move where I could definitely tell who was hitting for single digits and who was hitting for triple.
I liked that there were multiple valid options for equipment most of the time instead of standard RPG escalating bonuses. I feel like the final loadout of the party was an intentional one that played into how I used each character. I didn't ever feel like anyone had too few choices, although some were easier to rule out than others. The cheater's bat looked enticing at first glance but I was not about to start using Devon's basic attack at that point in the game. The happy charm was interesting - I might put it on Jasper, I didn't find any of their skills terribly critical for the 5 seconds they were on the team.
I wish I had some kind of guide to status rules and effects that was more concrete than trial, error, guesswork, and playing through Slimes previously. Even the way that buffs and debuffs apply to both defense or both attack stats at the same time wasn't clear at first - the crossword of MDF/DEF and MAT/ATK is clever but wasn't obvious enough for me.
I liked the semi-random stat-up and stat-down events when eating out, resting, etc, but those tapered off in impact as I got to higher levels.
Open-ness
Aside from the beginning with solo Ramona getting a lot of games over, I did feel like I usually had a couple of things to do at any given time. Sometimes I'd go back into a dungeon I had already cleared to see if there was anything else worth checking out, once I had enough resources or team members to feel comfortable wandering around - that's how I got revenge on the scorpion nest in the warehouse and found the hidden shrine. I didn't end up using hints at all - an itemized quest list was more than sufficient.
I feel like the Tower is much more central to multiple plot threads than I had initially realized. Besides recruiting Devon and saving Jasper, it seemed like I could have altered the outcome of the Manor dungeon by visiting there first, or pursued the thread with the cultists in their base. I stayed away for most of the game because basically every third or fourth adventurer NPC was a walking PSA that dungeons were deathtraps, and because I never had to visit to follow the plot threads already in front of me (aside from recruiting Devon or rescuing Jasper). It might work against the open-endedness of the game a little but it might be good to put a little pressure on the player to go check it out - maybe there's a rule about not accessing tier 2 quests until you clear stratum 1, or some loot you sometimes find like the hint tokens or special keys that can only be (usefully) redeemed in there, or not being allowed to take more than one of uzbek's quests in one day but have you considered going to the Tower instead? Or it could be left the way it is - I just felt that climbing at the end of my playthrough made me feel like I had missed out a little.
I felt like the maps were large and detailed enough to capture the locations they depicted. There wasn't a lot of detail or texture to some locations but those things take time and assets and I really can't blame you if downtown's gotta have vague undefined block towers. It might be nice to have a map somewhere that does nothing mechanically but gives you a better sense of where the bus is taking you. I thought it was a little odd that the non-recurring NPCs all used the same sprite but once I got used to it it didn't really bother me.
I liked running into the cast of adventurers throughout the game and seeing how their dialogue and situations changed as you progressed. I'm terrible with names but I think giving them some of the limited budget of character portraits and overworld sprites was a good choice.
Other thoughts
I tried some of the other music tracks and liked them, but for the tone of this game nothing really beats the default battle music. Some of the soundtracks I liked added a lot of intensity to the boss theme but added way too much intensity to the standard battle theme. The default music lends a somewhat goofy, somewhat sardonic vibe to what are often decidedly nonheroic encounters which I thought was more apprioriate than anything more serious. It also fits way better with all of the overworld music.
I didn't turn on :) mode because I didn't actually read what it did until after playing through. For some reason I got the impression that it was mostly dialogue changes and that it didn't add additional encounters or content.
There are a handful of cool stylistic touches like the battle-open splash or the encounter title drops that I appreciated. Even if the art budget is "what you can draw in your free time" I think these helped nail something distinctive. I also think the portrait style for the characters and battle effects is quite nice. Outside of the red-and-black of Slimes it comes off a lot more cartoony (which fits the tone and the music just fine imo) and its pretty effective at helping me distinguish the cast (even if I'm shit at names). I never quite figured out who was in Devon's attack animation though.
My favorite enemy was probably the business slime.
I'll pick this up again when there's more content to roam. I might even start a new file - even without two or three "test" redemptions of the $1000 quest I'm feeling like I kind of sailed off the difficulty curve at some point. Also, now that I've bothered to read what it does, I'd like to try out :) mode from the jump.